I joined a support group online for people with depressed or bipolar spouses. I expected to find other people who know what it is like to sit downstairs alone in the evenings imagining life after their husband’s suicide.

What I didn’t expect was to end up becoming a relationship counsellor.

Some people are angry and impatient with their spouse’s depressive symptoms. They use words like “lazy” and “can’t be bothered” and “selfish”. I have to remind them that depression is a disease and should be treated as such. They shouldn’t go around getting angry at someone for being sick.

There’s a difference between “won’t” and “can’t”. People with depression often CAN’T get out of bed, CAN’T interact positively and CAN’T pull it together for important family events.

Others are putting up with horrific levels of verbal and emotional and occasionally physical abuse, and blaming it on the depression/mania/addiction. They talk about how their husband tried to choke them and threatened to kill them and say “I had to call the cops. I felt so guilty, I really hate this illness. I know he won’t understand why I did it, either. He’ll think I am against him.”

I have to remind them that depression or bipolar disorder is not a get-out-of-abuse-free card that gives someone carte blanche to emotionally damage their loved ones, particularly their children. You shouldn’t stay with someone who abuses you or puts your children at risk physically or emotionally just because the person is ill, especially when that person keeps insisting that this is all somehow your fault.

But how, people are always asking, do you know what is okay and what is not? Why is okay for my wife to sleep through our daughter’s birthday party, but it isn’t okay for her husband to swear in front of the kids?

So I have developed a litmus test to tell what should, and what should not, be tolerated from a spouse.

The Cancer Principle

Since depression is a deadly disease which causes a wide range of known physical symptoms, I find that cancer makes a good analog because it is a deadly disease without the stigma that comes with mental illnesses. Depression is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Like cancer, some cases are worse than others, and some kinds are more curable than others.

Really, though, you could use any illness that is serious enough to put someone in the hospital. The point is to consider it from the point of view of “my spouse has a serious disease” and not “my spouse is abnormal”.

So, when your depressed husband or wife does something that makes you angry (and they will – it’s hard NOT to be angry when they suddenly sleep through an important event, or leave you scrambling for child care at the last minute, or snap at you for no good reason), ask yourself this:

Would this be considered acceptable if they had cancer?

For example – I go out for a walk with Owl and Perfect Husband is perfectly fine, watching football. I come back and discover that he has crashed in the hour that we have been gone. He is now in the throes of a suicidal misery. He snaps at me twice, then removes himself to the bedroom because he realises that he is growling like an injured bear.

Would this be considered acceptable if he had cancer?

I conclude that the answer is yes – if he had cancer and he suddenly started to feel sick or his pain medications wore off and he became very painful, it is understandable that he would become snappy and then retreat to the bedroom to be alone.

On the other hand, if he had gone onto a verbally abusive tirade calling me a “selfish whore” and threatened to hit Owl, that would NOT have been okay, no matter how much pain he was in.

For example – Perfect Husband agrees to watch the baby while I go to train a puppy. When the day arrives, he has been unconscious for two days and is clearly going to sleep through today as well. I have to cancel the appointment and reschedule it with apologies.

Would this be considered acceptable if he had cancer?

Yes! He was feeling better and thought he could handle it, but then he had a relapse and had to take medications which made him very sleepy and unable to take care of his child. If that was due to cancer, that would be totally understandable.

So I was not angry with him.

On the other hand, if he had agreed to watch the baby and then went out partying with friends and didn’t come back until 5 am, only to fall on the bed dead-drunk, that would not have been okay whether or not he had cancer, so I would have had the right to be angry with him about it.

For example- I watch Breaking Bad. Walter White’s wife discovers that her husband is manufacturing and selling meth, and his contacts with the drug underworld is putting himself and her family in serious danger. He has cancer. Does that make his behaviour okay?

No!

The Cancer Principle. It works every time.

Once someone argued with me, saying “I think there’s a caveat – if they aren’t seeking treatment. My husband sleeps all day and snaps at all of us and he won’t get help and that’s not okay.”

Okay, so then you ask yourself, if he had cancer, and it was making him sick and miserable and yet he refused to seek treatment for his cancer (not even palliative/symptomatic treatment), would that be okay?

Perfect Husband and I are in bed and settling down to sleep. For me “settling down to sleep” means reading for an hour in dim light until I develop the ability to go unconscious. For Perfect Husband, it means *snore snore snore snore*.

Perfect Husband: “I have a vital task for you.”

Me: “What?”

Perfect Husband: “Before you go to sleep, turn the dryer on to timed dry so it doesn’t run all night. Do this, and I will reward you with riches beyond your wildest dreams.”

Perfect Husband: “Because waffles with syrup BUT NO BUTTER are inedible?”

Me: “Yep. The butter is a vital component of waffle eating.”

Perfect Husband: “How can you waste food like that?”

Me: “Would you eat something you didn’t want rather than just throw it away?”

Perfect Husband: “Yes!! I can’t just THROW FOOD AWAY.”

Me: “Why would I eat a high calorie fattening meal if I wouldn’t even enjoy it? Either way it’s a waste.”

Perfect Husband: “You and I are, in some ways, very different people.”

Yesterday:

Perfect Husband: “So, while you were at your friend’s house for dinner, I decided to eat hot dogs.”

Me: “Oh?”

Perfect Husband: “So I defrosted two hot dog buns. Then I took out the wieners, and I realized that they were two weeks expired. So I took out the OTHER wieners, and found that they were a month expired. So I took out the OTHER OTHER wieners, and they were TWO MONTHS expired.”

Me: “I’m sorry.”

Perfect Husband: “…So I THREW THE BUNS AWAY.”

Me: “…But why not just put the buns back?”

Perfect Husband: Because I’d already toasted them and put cheese on them.”

“Oh, it’s a boy? Congratulations! I guess now you can start narrowing down names, eh?”

I’ve heard this several times, and I laugh. Because we had our first son and first daughter named before Perfect Husband was even a Perfect Fiance. We worked it out in our first year of dating.

I forget how it started – some idle remark in conversation – but once it did, we couldn’t stop. We’d come out with it at the oddest times. Driving home from dinner with his folks, walking down the street with grocery bags in our hands, or from the bed in the silence and the dark of night, one of us would say “Brian?” or “Alice?” and the other would respond. Watching the credits after a movie, we’d ask each other,

“Gigi?”

“Julio?”

“Seriously – Owen?”

I vetoed a couple of his top favourites, and he vetoed some of mine. I thought his suggestion was too popular – I knew way too many people with that name – and he thought mine was too old-fashioned, and sounded like an old lady’s name. I didn’t like any of the nicknames that came with another suggestion, because if a name CAN be shortened, people WILL shorten it (ask my father’s family, who actually thought they could name their son Lawrence and have him go through life not being called “Larry”). He didn’t have good associations with my next suggestion. There were a couple of names we were both lukewarm on, but not enthusiastic about.

But there was one boy’s name on my list that PH liked and approved of, and one of my top girl’s names sounded right to him, so we settled on their names and they became real to us, as named people. We would talk about our future son and daughter by name frequently.

It was so much fun, though, that we never really stopped. We still sit through the end of the credits of the movies, saying stuff like

“Geefwee. Let’s totally name our son Geefwee.”

and “Burt! Can we name our kid Burt?”

“Okay, but only if it’s a girl.”

“Sold.”

When I hear about couples who can’t decide on a name until days or even weeks after the birth, I’m baffled. It’s so much fun to talk about, and I think we both felt that it was important to decide such things before we took a step as big as marriage. After all, what if we had gotten married, only to discover that one of us wanted to name our son “Shaggy” and our daughter “Velma” or our son “Chivalry” and our daughter “Chastity”*

I mean, that could be a deal-breaker right there.

*Apologies out there who have kids named after Scooby Doo characters or obsolete virtues. It’s just not our personal style.

Two years. Is it really two years? Not two hundred years? Not two minutes? Because it feels like both.

We met nine years ago. We were best friends eight years ago. I finally gave you a chance four years ago.

We’ve only been married two?

You’re the man of my dreams. You have the chivalry of Fitzwilliam Darcy, without the stiff politeness. You have the passion of Edward Rochester, without the arrogance. You have the devotion of Noah Calhoun, and the perseverance of Orpheus. You are all the lovers in all the books, and none of them, because you are better than any of them.